Brian Jean's byelection win sets the stage for showdown with Alberta premier Jason Kenney
CBC
This column is an opinion from Graham Thomson, an award-winning journalist who has covered Alberta politics for more than 30 years. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.
The melodrama that is Alberta politics has just become a street brawl.
And newly elected MLA Brian Jean is bringing his brass knuckles – along with almost five-years worth of anger and resentment.
For Jean, winning the Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche byelection Tuesday night was not a means in itself but a means to an end. Namely, ending the career of Premier Jason Kenney.
It is a bizarre twist in an already twisted political landscape where Alberta's premier, once the darling of Conservatives across Canada, has been the most disliked provincial leader in the country for much of the past two years.
And now we have a UCP candidate who handily won a byelection on a campaign promise to overthrow the leader of the UCP.
And, as if it was part of this crazy plot, the UCP has organized a special general meeting in Red Deer on April 9 where party members will vote on Kenney's leadership.
"On April 9th we have a chance to reinvigorate our party and be competitive in the next election and if Jason Kenney is still there, we won't be," declared Jean Tuesday night.
"We need him to go."
Winning the byelection was the easy part. Jean won 63.6 per cent of the vote.
The NDP was a distant second and the Wildrose Independence Party came third, which wasn't such a bad result given the candidate, party leader Paul Hinman, parachuted himself into the riding.
For Jean, now comes the heavy lifting and it will be akin to piggy-backing an elephant up a mountain.
As he told his supporters Tuesday night, the next big day is this Saturday.
That's the cutoff for people to join the UCP and be eligible to vote on April 9.
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